Make Things With Your Hands
A lot of your jobs on the leftist commune would be making textiles i think
This piece was originally written for Salon Rógaire, a literary event in Dublin with the proceeds going to Women’s Aid. Thank you so much to Róisín Nic Ghearailt for hosting, to all the other performers, and to everyone who came! I had a really great time. If you would like to donate to Women’s Aid, you can do so here. Nollaig na mBan shona dhaoibh!
Ireland is famous for its knitting. This place is wet, cold, and hospitable to sheep. A tight-knit wool jumper was, prior to the widespread availability of mass produced plastics, one of the most waterproof garments you could get your hands on around here. Every year American tourists flock to shops that promise them access to the specific cable patterns associated with their family name that would have been used to identify sailors drowned at sea. The salt water might have bloated and disfigured them beyond recognition, but the stitches never lied.
Shops selling these jumpers offer a chance to buy your way into a shared Irish identity, to purchase the right to this imagined community. Buying these garments means you’re not only able to claim some kind of Irishness, but you also get a wearable totem of authenticity. The consumer is transformed from an ignorant tourist into someone entitled to this history, one that holds enough sadness to be taken seriously. If they were to drown during their afternoon boat tour, they could rest peacefully knowing that if they were pulled from the water, locals would look at their new jumper and say “this is one of ours, boys.” The only problem is that none of it is true.
The claim that the variety of cable knit patterns across Ireland represent different villages or families is fiction. Just like love was invented by guys like Don Draper to sell nylons, these knitting myths were invented to sell jumpers to tourists - and it works. We have come to expect such morbidity from Irish folk myths as mothers and widows poring over waterlogged clothes to identify their men. Those garments were practical, but they didn’t carry secret codes about who your family was or where you came from. They just carried what every knitted garment carries: the knowledge that someone had to make it with their hands, one stitch after another.
The communities that originally produced aran jumpers operated under vastly different economic structures to those that allow big businesses with quaint storefronts to sell them now. These garments were historically created out of necessity, out of love, and out of the unpaid labour of women. They were not acquired by monetary exchange, but by a match of needs and means. Alongside the obviously patriarchal structure of women relegated to their knitting while the menfolk ventured out to sea, it does conjure an ideal of communal resource allocation, people working for the good of the collective.
When you’re knitting for someone, your mind may not be constantly thinking of them while you work, but your hands are. Over and over in a meditation of body, labour, and soul. For fishermen, a handknit jumper was something from home, something from green fields and dry land that helped them weather the storms on the Atlantic. It tied them to a family and community who hoped that one way or another they’d make it back.
The commercial myths that have sprung up around cable knits allow people to believe in communities that cared deeply for each other. For the low, low price of a couple of hundred quid, they are allowed to believe that way back when, they would have been part of one. One of the more endearing myths about knitting is that a piece of the knitter’s soul gets trapped in every garment, so they must leave at least one small hole or mistake to let it escape through. I don’t think the ones sold to tourists have holes in them.
Throughout the twentieth century, the Irish economy industrialising and growing alongside global trade liberalisation meant that more people could afford to buy increasingly mass produced clothes rather than be forced to spend their time making them by hand. Particularly for women, the changing nature of domestic life and work was a largely positive shift. My life is so different to my grandmother’s at this age it’s like we grew up on different planets.
Some new materials are so good. Neoprene wetsuits are definitely better to surf in than wool soaked in water resistant oil. Still, our wardrobes are now mostly plastic. It has become a popular hot take to say “clothes are just worse now!” and point to the standard of 90’s knitwear in When Harry Met Sally. The globalisation of supply chains means that we have become accustomed to the cheap convenience of worse clothes from further away.
All clothes are handmade to some extent, but the hands making them in factories in Bangladesh, China, and Vietnam are not hands people like to think about. Many of them belong to women younger than me, with less education, less leisure time, less workplace protections, less opportunities to live any other way. Women here may have been spared from lifetimes of garment construction, free to pursue other things, but only because that labour was reshaped, outsourced, shunted on to women poorer than us, women with less choice in the matter. They are not making these clothes for us, they are making them for a living, and not a fair one.
No longer the poor relation, Ireland chose the mod cons of the twentieth century over our traditional cultural practices time and time again. Not in the fun ways like abortion and stuff, but in some ways more useful than others. The means of production had shifted. Why bake a cake of bread every day, when it’s cheaper to buy one thanks to economies of scale? Why cook and eat seaweed, the way our impoverished ancestors did, when we could eat nice, proper, modern food. You could even microwave it! Sinn Féin even stopped dressing like they were auditioning to be backup singers for the Clancy Brothers and cleaned up in suits that invited the dig tiocfaigh Armani.
The funny thing is that, sooner or later, the more undesirable aspects of these tradeoffs become so apparent that the winds of fashion begin to blow back in the opposite direction. The traditions of the past are pulled into present day capitalism’s economic structures with deafening clangs. Sometimes that’s “authentic” traditional food at Michelin star restaurants, sometimes it’s far-right tradwife influencers. Now, some of the coolest girls I know are making their own clothes. Knit jumpers and skinny scarves, crochet balaclavas and bonnets, they’re sewing and upcycling full outfits for the quality and silhouettes that fast fashion just can’t offer.
They all have other jobs, other hobbies, a whole life outside of this. It is almost entirely women doing it too. JW Anderson might be the big name in the fashion industry, but actually making clothes still seems to be calcified as women’s work. When I started knitting, my nana was impressed and excited - and confused. What put the thought of that in your head she asked. Meaning: You don’t have to do this, so why do you want to? I think I want to because I don’t have to.
I am not confined to the work of garment construction, I am not liberated by endless choices of consumption. I think that choosing to make the things we need and want, one stitch at a time, makes them ours. It helps us to value what we have, see the labour and resources that go into things we use and rely on every single day. We need to publicly negotiate the way we reintroduce these craft practices into our lives without reproducing all of the entrenched patriarchal and capitalist values they’ve upheld.
Crafting has always been a function of community. There doesn’t need to be such a vast difference between a knitting circle and a consciousness raising one. The resurgence of handcrafted clothing is one of many opportunities to imagine new modes of production, new economic structures built around what we value rather than profit. This is an opportunity to engage in something tangible, not mediated by the privately owned and heavily surveilled social internet. We’re not just touching grass, we’re touching wool, touching cotton. Looking down at our own hands when we talk about seizing the means of production.
These are the tactile details of our lives. They matter. Craft is our chance to be excited about where things come from rather than being afraid to find out. When we get serious about imagining an alternative to capitalism, challenging the gendered division of labour, building community, working as a collective to provide the things we need for ourselves, making clothes isn’t a bad place to start. Maybe making change starts when you make things with your hands.